How To Make Chocolate Skulls

Virtual Diaper Drive

If you are not in Los Angeles and/or can't attend my super awesome Holiday Playdate in Beverly Hills on December 13, you CAN help by hosting a virtual diaper drive. Wherever you live in the country, there's bound to be families who are struggling, and would be grateful for the extra help. Whatever your personal feelings about why people are in positions of poverty or homelessness, you can't blame the children. Why not help them instead?

Wendy Copley of the blog Wendolonia is doing just that. See how she is choosing to host a drive. You can do it, too! Help a Mother Out has a diaper drive toolkit to get you started. Or, contact me and I'll coach you through it, although I must confess I haven't done one yet myself. No, I'm going big with this huge party I'm throwing. I mean, come on. It's Los Angeles. A small splash is no splash at all.

In other helpy news, Lands' End is hosting a used coat collection drive all over the country. It's called the Big Warmup - if you bring a gently used coat to one of their collection sites, it will make it into the hands of a needy, cold person, and you will get 20% off a new Lands' End coat. More details at Help a Mother Out.

Can you tell I'm excited about all this? I just got back from the chiropractor. My back feels better, I have a cup of hot coffee at my side, and things are finally happening. It's a good morning.

He's Not Famous. Yet.

The Ballad of Enoch Foster - Charlie Vaughn and the Daily Routine from Nathan Bloch on Vimeo.

Remember my coworker, Charlie, whose music I reviewed and promoted here a while back? This is him.

For more video ha-ha, hope on over to HOP Reviews (I didn't even do that on purpose!) to see my thoughts about Pixorial and my new Flip cam. Hint: if you are one of my relatives, or if you like seeing videos of my children, you will LOVE this.

Blogging for Good! Help a Mother Out's Holiday Playdate in Los Angeles

SAVE THE DATE, y'all.

To formally introduce the Help a Mother Out mission to the Los Angeles area, I am throwing a party at Treehouse Social Club in Beverly Hills, a super nice indoor playground with an elegant and whimsical style. Admission is a pack of diapers, any size (although larger sizes are always needed!).

Sunday, December 13
3 - 6 PM
Treehouse Social Club
426 S Robertson Blvd
Los Angeles

The kids will play! You will mingle! And more babies will have diapers this holiday season. And that will be good.

More details to come soon. If you can help me spread the word, email me!

The Pink Astronaut

The problem with Halloween and young children and being very social people is that there are multiple occasions on which to wear costumes leading up to Halloween night itself. When a young child wears a costume at a party that has chocolate, or paints, or dirt in the backyard, that costume will without variation become so dirty that before it can be worn again it must be washed.

Furthermore, the problem with the costumes MY children wear is that they are of the cheap, Target-bought variety, made of polyester, certainly flammable, and subject to easy ruin.

In addition, I am not the world's most crafty or domestically inclined mother.

Given the above conditions, it is not a great surprise that I turned Kyle's astronaut costume pink, entirely by accident but not in a way that could not have been avoided with a tiny bit of forethought.

Our Halloween festivities began the first weekend of October with a playdate at my friend Claudia's house. It really was a full Halloween party, complete with Jello molded hearts and brains and eyeballs. The children decorated buckets and then used those to trick or treat around the house. They cavorted and snacked and got dirty and all was well.

And then we had another party to go to, so I washed the costumes. I washed them on "delicate" in cold water and then hung them to dry. Still, a hole opened in Brady's Spiderman costume, one that could not be ignored.

A word about Spiderman. Kyle is 4 and a half years old, which means he has had four Halloweens previous to this year, two of which he has been Spiderman, which means we have two Spiderman costumes. This year, he declared early on that he wanted to be an astronaut (naturally) and I found a relatively inexpensive astronaut getup on the internet. I smugly put it up in the closet in early September, prepared.

Once we got to the Halloween parties, however, Kyle changed his mind and wanted to be Spiderman again. So I dressed him in the old costume from last year and ignored the too-short sleeves and too-short pant legs that he didn't notice anyway. He still looked adorable. For that first party, Brady was dressed in the 2-year-old Spiderman outfit, which is of course too small for him because he is an enormous 2-year-old.

So now we have two Spidermen cavorting around town. Adorable.

At the first Halloween party. Yes, Brady's is on backwards, because by the time I realized I had put it on backwards Brady was off and running, and I didn't feel like fighting with him.

Kyle debuted the astronaut costume last weekend at our friends' awesome "Nightmare Before Christmas" Halloween party. He was the cutest little space ranger there, and he had so much fun that day that he fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the very crowded and loud party.


Brady was frat boy Spiderman, wearing the larger costume so I had to keep rolling up the sleeves and pant legs all night long, and partying until we dragged him out of there. He ran back and forth through the house with the bigger kids, shouting in delight at the "scary" displays and trying to blow out all the candles.

I dressed up too, resurrecting my Beer Wench costume from last year, which I amended to be named Medieval Peasant when describing it to the children.


The sweaty astronaut and the chocolatey Spiderman had to be washed again, and since my costume had been well worn, too, I threw them all in the same delicate polyester soup together.

Note the color of my skirt.

I thought I had washed it last year, but perhaps I hadn't. After all, once Halloween is done I just shove everything into the storage box and stick it up in the garage for next year.

The night before Kyle's school parade, I took the wash out of the machine and noticed that the white astronaut costume had a pinkish hue, and I realized with dread that the color of my skirt had run. "He'll never notice," I thought. Then I pulled the vest out, and that was even pinker. I showed Stewart, who laughed and shook his head and said "That's definitely pink." We decided that I would throw it back in the wash with a white load and some bleach. What could happen?

Well, it's less pink now but the graphics on the vest look like someone has chewed them. Luckily, Kyle decided he wanted to be Spiderman again for the school parade. Unfortunately, as soon as Brady saw him in the outfit he said "Where's MY Fiderman?"

Well, his Spiderman costume had this enormous hole in the seam right in the chest area of the jumpsuit. I am no seamstress, opting to bunch buttonless shirts into the corner of a closet and eventually get my mother to fix them when she visits rather than fix that button myself. So I did what any quick-thinking white trash mom would do: I grabbed a stapler, turned that puppy inside out, and presto-change-o, we had a nicely closed hole. No one would be the wiser.

Two Spidermen, off to to their school and daycare to show off their identical and mostly intact costumes. And they lived happily ever after.

Except that today is Halloween and I have a chewed-looking, slightly pink astronaut costume and two dirty Spiderman costumes. I am going to take advantage, once again, of the ignorance of young children and hope I can get away with it one more time. Kids, if you're reading this later in life, forgive me. You had a great time and never knew how I jerry-rigged your stuff. Love, Mom.

Listening To...

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September's coming soon
I'm pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?
That bright, tight forever drum
Could not describe nightswimming

-From "Nightswimming," by R.E.M.

Station Break

Vegas put me over the edge.

I drove out there in a car sent by GM for this blogger roadtrip. I stayed at a hotel that I will feature on Uptake. I ate at restaurants that I may feature on Uptake. I went to a blogger conference. I got updates about the Notre Dame vs. USC game on Twitter. I networked with the participants of Blog World Expo. I met another gaggle of blog, tech, and web personalities.

I came home with another big bag of free products with brand logos on them.

Sigh.

It's not that I don't love this world, or the brands that continue to let us do what we do. It's just that...

I'm tired.

I miss my children.

I have a day job.

I'm starting to feel guilty when I attend evening events after work. I usually limit them to once a week or not at all, because I don't get home from work until 7pm as it is. I have about 30 carefree minutes with the kids before the bedtime routine starts. If I go out in the evening, I don't see them at all.

When I got back from Vegas, I found that despite all the tales I have to tell, I was unable to write them. I'm not complaining. I just need a break. All is well, and I'll get back to my usual posting schedule soon. I don't know when, but soon. And when I say back to usual, I am going to make it a point to blog about what matters. Like making fun of annoying yoga instructors, and how Kyle has been dropping the F-bomb just to see what I'll do.

My house is awesome like that.